Museum Workers Manifesto Session 4: Access Issues for Museum Workers & Visitors

On Sunday February 9th, as part of the Museum Workers Manifesto Sessions at Art Workers Lab @PS122, Tressa Belesi and Lily Lipman from the Tenement Museum are leading a session on access.

Tressa Belesi and Lily Lipman are the co-founders of the Access Caucus at the Tenement Museum. The session will explore what it means to be a worker with a disability. Tressa and Lily will facilitate a discussion about improving accessibility for workers and visitors at museums and cultural institutions. Participants will work together to identify current challenges, as well as what institutions are doing right, and create tools and outline actions to improve accessibility. These tools and actions will be detailed in the Museum Workers Manifesto for museums and cultural institutions across New York City to implement.

This session is open to the public, but is particularly geared toward museum and cultural institution workers, as well as museum visitors and individuals who work in the access field.

The Museum Workers Manifesto* will be developed by museum workers from across New York City as a vision for the kind of mutual support we intend to give and receive from the museum community, be it employers, co-workers, contractors, specialists, visitors, community members both local and international. 

The manifesto will be rooted in ethics, accountability, equity, and workers rights. We expect the highest of standards and compliance from the leading cultural institutions. We also want to create a space to reimagine museums as spaces of dialog and action that de-center narratives of settler-colonial and Eurocentric hegemony that maintain white supremacy, hetero-normativity, and ableism.

*Museum Workers is broadly defined to include workers at cultural institutions and community centers/organizations

Venue Accessibility: From the 1st Ave entrance and lobby, there is full wheelchair accessibility. From 9th Street, there are two steps: one from the sidewalk to the landing, and then one from the landing into the gallery. Gender neutral bathrooms and wheelchair accessible stalls on the ground floor.